id Software lead programmer John Carmack once again updated his .plan with a lengthy and technical discussion of graphics cards and related topics. Starting off with a follow-up to his earlier remarks on the Matrox Parhelia (story), John comments on a new 3Dlabs P10 card, using prototype OpenGL 2.0 extensions in a new DOOM III rendering back end for this card, future directions for GL2, and NVIDIA's Cg language. Here's an excerpt from the full .plan:

I am now committed to supporting an OpenGL 2.0 renderer for Doom through all
the spec evolutions. If anything, I have been somewhat remiss in not pushing
the issues as hard as I could with all the vendors. Now really is the
critical time to start nailing things down, and the decisions may stay with
us for ten years.

A GL2 driver won't give any theoretical advantage over the current back ends
optimized for cards with 7+ texture capability, but future research work will
almost certainly be moving away from the lower level coding practices, and if
some new vendor pops up (say, Rendition back from the dead) with a next-gen
card, I would strongly urge them to implement GL2 instead of proprietary
extensions.

And on a somewhat related note, John Carmack also posted a /. comment titled "Realtime and offline rendering ARE converging" in this thread regarding the use of graphics cards for real-time rendering of animated movies, in place of render farms and specialist rendering software.

Is John hinting at something he cannot talk about? I don't know how many of the people that read this site are old enough to have experienced the v2x000 series in their heyday, but if Renditions owners decided to re-enter the market with their brand, they too could really compete.

This could be really big news. It would finally make 3D cards just like the old 2D wars when there were more vendors than you could shake a stick at.